Hot and sour soup and honey-ginger chicken March 18, 2008

Last Thursday we made two dishes from Kylie Kwong’s Simple Chinese Cooking for dinner. I love to page through this book, with its beautiful full-page color photographs, but I admit, I haven’t taken the time to cook many recipes from it yet.

We started with hot and sour soup. This soup was different from a typical Chinese restaurant’s hot and sour soup. It’s full of vegetables, including peas, tomatoes, onions, mushrooms, cloud-ear fungus, and tofu. The flavorful broth is enhanced with soy sauce, vinegar, chili oil, and ginger and finally finished with beaten eggs in the style of egg-drop soup. I forgot to reduce the salt since I used chicken bouillon instead of homemade stock, so the soup was a bit salty, but delicious nonetheless. I did have to substitute dried cloud ear fungus for the fresh cloud ear fungus called for in the recipe, but the rest of the ingredients were easy to find. And of course, my finished soup didn’t match the stylist-perfect photo in the book, but it made up for in flavor what it lacked in the looks department.

Next we made stir-fried chicken fillets with honey and ginger. We started with chicken thighs and marinated them overnight in soy sauce, ginger, five-spice, and honey. Next we stir-fried the chicken. All of the ingredients for this recipe are easy to find and the preparation was dead simple. Since we had started with pre-cut boneless chicken thigh chunks, we didn’t even need a knife. Finally we finished the meal with a simple stir-fry of bok choi and na-no-hana and steamed rice.

Our Chinese dinner was a big success. Kylie Kwong’s recipes are simple and easy-to-follow. I can’t wait to try some more recipes from Simple Chinese Cooking.